Jury selection in murder case set Monday

Published: Sunday, December 2, 2012 at 08:13 PM.

PANAMA CITY — The trial of a woman accused of killing her husband and putting his body in a freezer is scheduled to begin Monday.

Unless of course the lawyers can’t find a jury.

Kim Dowgul, Judy Gsell’s appointed attorney, has asked the presiding judge in Gsell’s case, Elijah Smiley, to consider moving the trial to another county “where pretrial publicity and communal hostility concerning this case is slight enough as to allow the opportunity to obtain an impartial jury.”

Dowgul cites intense media coverage of the case as the reason it could be hard to find impartial jurors. Smiley might not have to even consider the possibility; Dowgul and prosecutor Larry Basford must first attempt to seat a jury of Bay Countians.

Gsell was arrested in January after a man called law enforcement to say Gsell and other people at Gsell’s Panama City house had shown him the body 80-year-old Raymond Gsell in a freezer. The tipster had been enlisted to help dispose of the body, but he told police he didn’t think they were serious.

Police reports indicate Judy Gsell and Dawn Ross strangled Raymond Gsell after he refused to give them money to buy drugs. After he was dead, Gsell, Ross and Ashley Knowles allegedly used his money to buy crack and continued partying.

Ross has pleaded no contest to a murder charge as part of an agreement with prosecutors to testify against Gsell in exchange for a 40-year prison sentence. In letters to Smiley from the jail, Gsell has said Ross killed her husband, and that she’s only guilty of failing to notify police.

PANAMA CITY — The trial of a woman accused of killing her husband and putting his body in a freezer is scheduled to begin Monday.

Unless of course the lawyers can’t find a jury.

Kim Dowgul, Judy Gsell’s appointed attorney, has asked the presiding judge in Gsell’s case, Elijah Smiley, to consider moving the trial to another county “where pretrial publicity and communal hostility concerning this case is slight enough as to allow the opportunity to obtain an impartial jury.”

Dowgul cites intense media coverage of the case as the reason it could be hard to find impartial jurors. Smiley might not have to even consider the possibility; Dowgul and prosecutor Larry Basford must first attempt to seat a jury of Bay Countians.

Gsell was arrested in January after a man called law enforcement to say Gsell and other people at Gsell’s Panama City house had shown him the body 80-year-old Raymond Gsell in a freezer. The tipster had been enlisted to help dispose of the body, but he told police he didn’t think they were serious.

Police reports indicate Judy Gsell and Dawn Ross strangled Raymond Gsell after he refused to give them money to buy drugs. After he was dead, Gsell, Ross and Ashley Knowles allegedly used his money to buy crack and continued partying.

Ross has pleaded no contest to a murder charge as part of an agreement with prosecutors to testify against Gsell in exchange for a 40-year prison sentence. In letters to Smiley from the jail, Gsell has said Ross killed her husband, and that she’s only guilty of failing to notify police.

Knowles has pleaded no contest to a count of accessory after the fact to first-degree murder in exchange for a sentence that keeps her out of state prison (but in jail). The deal requires her to testify, and she told Basford and Dowgul about that night during a deposition in November.

According to the transcript of that deposition, Knowles and Ross were dating, and they went to party with the Gsells. They drank and took prescription pills and smoked crack until Judy Gsell ran out of drugs and asked Raymond Gsell for money to buy more. He refused, they argued and the last thing Knowles said she saw before she went in the kitchen was Judy Gsell straddling her husband with her forearm on her throat.

Gsell is charged with first-degree murder and could be sentenced to life in prison if convicted. The trial is expected to begin with jury selection Monday, then resume Wednesday and continue until Friday.

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